Graphics applications such as 3D (3-dimensional) computer games, flight simulators and other 3D imaging systems may often involve the real-time rendering of a wide variety of scenes that can have complex and rich textures. Accordingly, these applications may include rendering code to enable the display of textures at various resolutions (e.g., high resolution for zooming into a scene and low resolution for zooming out of a scene). In particular, conventional rendering code usually has access to pre-filtered versions of these textures, at various resolutions. Some of these resolutions may in reality not be required, in part or in whole, to render the current frame; accordingly, they can be a waste of memory. Moreover, conventional solutions may also limit the texture image compression algorithm to that directly supported by the rendering hardware that performs the decoding. As a result, such a solution may experience relatively low compression rates and wasted memory, which could lead to less texture detail.